Joan Tower
(1938–)
Who Is
Joan Tower?
A Brief Introduction
Joan Tower arrived at early adulthood just as two great waves were breaking in the United States: a more polished kind of musical modernism and a wider awakening to feminism. She gladly accepted the challenges of both. In a large output of almost exclusively instrumental music, she has made color, shape, and propulsive rhythm take the place of more traditional elements to give her music strong features and a sure flow. Nothing in her work suggests a particularly female viewpoint. Rather, she claims a place within what was, in her youth, the firmly male environment of Western classical composition.
A professional pianist and chamber musician, Tower is adept at writing small-scale pieces that are grand in their gestures and energy. Her most frequently performed work, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1986), is a piece for brass and percussion composed in answer to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. She has followed it with other such fanfares (now totaling six).
Early Years: Finding a Path
Tower’s father was a mineralogist whose work took the family to Bolivia when she was nine. She attributes her feeling for dynamic rhythm and percussion to her experience of street festivals there. However, a whole other side of her musical personality came from her training as a pianist. Expertise in classical music, together with a vibrant cultural history, made her the composer she became.
She returned to the US for her education at Bennington and Columbia, where she earned her doctorate in 1968. The following year, with other young musicians in New York City, she founded the Da Capo Chamber Players, a quintet with the same instrumentation as Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. The music she wrote for this ensemble moved steadily away from the wide intervals and bold, bright dissonances characteristic of her 1960s works, and toward a sound world at once smoother and more dynamic. In an interview she recorded for CMS, she divides her music at this point into two periods: “Twelve tone”—referring to the principle she abandoned in 1976—“and then everything else.”
The music she wrote for this ensemble moved steadily away from the wide intervals and bold, bright dissonances characteristic of her 1960s works, and toward a sound world at once smoother and more dynamic. In an interview she recorded for CMS, she divides her music at this point into two periods: “Twelve tone”—referring to the principle she abandoned in 1976—“and then everything else.
1980s–1990s: Moving Forward
Petroushskates (1980), one of the first pieces in her new style, has short series of notes, taken from Stravinsky’s ballet Petroushka, that twirl like figure skaters. The following year, Tower produced Sequoia, her first notable orchestral composition, which might evoke for the listener the strength, height, and filigreed leaves of these great trees. Writing about the piece herself, however, she downplayed its pictorial element and drew attention to the “balancing of energies” she found in Beethoven. Not long after this came her First Piano Concerto (1985), subtitled Homage to Beethoven, which again balances power and delicacy. Tower is not completely averse to titles evoking the atmosphere and material of a work, as in Silver Ladders (1986), where ladders of notes, somber or dazzling, proceed through the piece. This achievement won her the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1990, making her the first woman and American-born composer to receive that prestigious honor.
Tower’s drive to balance energies often leads to continuous forms, as in all five of her string quartets, with the first, Night Fields, dating from 1994. There are exceptions, however, such as Still/Rapids (1996), her second piano concerto, in two movements. The opening stretch of calm is beautiful but unusual in Tower’s music; much more typical is the robust excitement of the longer second movement.
Tower: White Water for String Quartet
Once more, the obvious confidence of an early performance shows how Tower writes not only for the instruments but also for the players. Although the piece begins slowly and has a slow reprieve before the end, much of it goes at a cascading pace with glissandos shooting the rapids.
Late 1990s–2020s: A New Chapter
Concertos, lending themselves to drama, have continued to engage Tower, who has composed major examples for many instruments, including viola (Purple Rhapsody, 2005) and bassoon (Red Maple, 2013), double bass and brass perhaps being reserved for future endeavors.
Tower: Red Maple for Bassoon, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello
At the same time, Tower’s commitment to chamber music has not faltered. Besides the string quartet, she also composed for other small ensembles, such as piano trio (And…they’re off, 1997), clarinet quintet (Turning Points, 1995), and piano quartet (White Granite, 2010).
Tower has retained her productivity well into her 80s. There is, perhaps, a reflectiveness that her recent music has touched upon, as in her cello concerto A New Day (2021).
Legacy
Besides the large number of Tower’s concertos, other orchestral scores, chamber works, and virtuoso solos—most of which hold a place in the standard repertory—her legacy lies in her example to younger women and members of other underrepresented groups who have been similarly sidelined. More directly, she has been passing on her experience to students at Bard College, where she has served on the faculty since 1972.
Watching and Listening
Several of Tower’s later works can be heard in the Chamber Music Society’s Digital Archive, one of the earliest being Rising for flute and string quartet (2009). This is sensitively presented by Carol Wincenc, the flutist for whom it was written, with the Escher String Quartet in 2012. The piece was still quite new at the time, yet all the musicians have total command of its fine flurries and insistent rising pitches. As in much of Tower’s music, there is drama: the flute re-enters with a cadenza to cool the intensity that has been building in the strings and will flare again.
Simply Purple (2008) and Purple Rush (2016) are two pieces for solo viola commissioned by CMS for Paul Neubauer, who plays them impeccably: songful in the first, with rising lines, and dazzling in the second, which he premiered.
There are two recordings of Tower’s fifth string quartet, White Water (2011): the first by the Daedalus String Quartet in January 2013, nine months after they premiered the piece in Carmel, California. Once more, the obvious confidence of an early performance shows how Tower writes not only for the instruments but also for the players. Although the piece begins slowly and has a slow reprieve before the end, much of it goes at a cascading pace with glissandos shooting the rapids.
No less engrossing is a performance by the Calidore String Quartet from almost a decade later that is briefly introduced by the composer. Tower appears more prominently in a “Composers in Focus” program from 2021 that includes a recording of Neubauer’s Purple Rush premiere and the last five minutes of Red Maple in its version for bassoon and string quartet. This extract comes from a full recording of Red Maple made in 2019 by Peter Kolkay and the Calidore String Quartet. Kolkay’s outstanding performance—songful, deftly humorous, agile—once more demonstrates the virtues of Tower’s performer-friendly, yet challenging, music.
